Trusting institutions is safest when everyone else appears to rely on them too

Evidence

If everyone seems to be relying on the police or the banks or the government, it is relatively safe for me to rely on them too. Still, this may be an unstable relationship that can suddenly tip. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 521

Categorization

• XREF: This is the proximity of Hardin’s baseline to Luhmann’s ‘familiarity’ — mutual reliance on institutions sustains trust until the observable signal fails, exactly the substrate blindness erases.